The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen

when the twenty-four-year-old fighter-pilot Rudolf Hess journeyed home by train to his parents in Bavaria in December 1918, he took with him the bitter depression of defeat and the deep feelings of betrayal shared by the millions of other men suddenly discharged from Germany’s armed forces. However, Hess was not a typical German, and his background – for a man destined to hold high political office in 1930s Germany – was most unusual. He was what was called an Ausländer, an ethnic German born overseas.

      Rudolf Walter Richard Hess had been born in a luxurious villa in the Egyptian coastal resort of Ibrahimieh, a few miles to the east of Alexandria, on 26 April 1894. His background was to have a profound effect upon the man he would become. Although recognised as a reasonably bright child, he would grow to be a frustrated young man, expected to take over the reins of the family business, the successful mercantile company Hess & Co., run by his domineering father, Fritz Hess.

      Rudolf Hess’s childhood with his younger brother Alfred and sister Margarete was an idyllic one. The Hess children played adventurous games in the substantial grounds of the family home. At night they would stand on the villa’s flat roof, gaze up at the Egyptian night sky, and listen enraptured as their mother explained the wonders of the cosmos, the intricacies of the solar system.

      Although Hess’s parents were established and well settled in Egypt, seeming to have made a successful transition to expatriate life, they had not broken their ties with the mother country. Fritz Hess was proud of his German heritage, displaying a large portrait of the Kaiser in his office, and being most particular to ensure he took his family ‘home’ to the more temperate climate of southern Germany every summer. On these visits the Hess children re-established their German identities, wandering the countryside north-west of Nuremberg, enjoying family picnics, and establishing friendships that would last a lifetime.

      This charmed life ended for the young Rudolf when he reached the age of fourteen. In September 1908, instead of returning to Egypt with his family after their summer holiday, Rudolf travelled to Bad Godesberg to attend the Evangelical School, where he was to receive his first formal education, having been educated at home since the age of six by a tutor. The young Hess showed an aptitude for mathematics and science, much to the concern of his father, who was hoping for a son who would take over the family business when the time came. In the hope of igniting the commercial spark that would turn his son into a young entrepreneur, Fritz Hess sent Rudolf to the École Supérieur de Commerce in Neuchâtel, hoping that some of the Swiss acumen for business would rub off on his son.

      In 1912, after a year of high expense for the father, and comprehensive cramming by the son, the eighteen-year-old Rudolf left Switzerland to join the flourishing Hamburg trading company of Feldt Stein & Co. as an apprentice. As he took his first tentative steps as an adult in the heady atmosphere of pre-war Hamburg, Rudolf was blissfully unaware that the worst war the world had ever seen was about to erupt. Yet this was also a war that would give Hess his first great adventure, his chance to break free of the future his parents had mapped out for him as a middle-class businessman.

      Far from the delights of belle époque Hamburg, in distant Sarajevo the course of European history was changed forever on 28 June 1914, when a young Serb named Gavrilo Princip shot dead the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his consort Sophie Chotek, the Duchess of Hohenburg. Princip’s were the first shots that would herald an unimaginably terrible war that would not only sweep away the flower of Europe’s young men, but change forever the political complexion of the continent.

      Rudolf Hess was among the very first bands of young men to volunteer, quitting his job in the summer of 1914 to join the German infantry. Over the next four years he would see action in many of the horror-spots of the war, from the Western Front at Ypres and Verdun to the Carpathian Mountains on the Eastern Front, where he was severely wounded. However, against all the odds, he survived – a remarkable testament not only to his luck, but to his mental strength as well. Eventually, with considerable persistence, he managed to get himself inducted into Germany’s fledgling Air Corps, where he trained and became a fighter-pilot flying Fokker triplanes in Belgium during the last weeks of the war.

      Now, as he returned home at the end of the war only to find turmoil and political unrest, he commented bitterly: ‘I witnessed the horror of death in all its forms … battered for days under heavy bombardment … hungered and suffered, as indeed have all front-line soldiers. And is all this to be in vain, the suffering of the good people at home all for nothing?’¹

      Not only had Hess seen his once-glorious nation go down to crushing defeat, but his father’s successful business in Egypt had been ruined by the war, and was eventually taken over by the victorious Allies. It was a loss Fritz Hess never really recovered from, psychologically or financially; his son’s bitterness ran deep indeed, on both a national and a personal level.

      The manner in which the First World War ended, and the deep sense of betrayal felt by the returning German soldiers, would dominate German politics for the coming twenty years. At this time were sown the seeds of bitterness that would be cultivated by the men who would rise to power in the 1930s – men just like Rudolf Hess, who believed that victory had been swindled from them by a devious gang of traitors at home: Communists, Socialists, wishy-washy liberals; and, worst of all, some of the more ultra-right wing declared, the Jews. It would become a dangerous and volatile cocktail of disillusionment and hate, just waiting to explode.

      On returning to Bavaria at the end of November 1918, Hess found his country facing a peril he had only read about in newspapers – the threat of a Bolshevik revolution similar to that which had taken place in Russia a year before. A militant Bolshevik organisation called the Spartakusbund had taken over Bavaria, overthrown the legitimate Bavarian government, and set up its own Soviet Republic of Bavaria, the Räterepublik.

      With the end of war, Germany had been plunged into political turmoil. On one side was the far left, predominantly led by militant workers and educated men well-versed in the works of Marx; on the other was the right wing, made up virtually without exception of the middle classes and war veterans determined that these Bolshevik troublemakers should be crushed completely before Germany descended into chaos. The country teetered on the very edge of an abyss that had the potential to mirror what was taking place in Russia.

      Intent on taking his part in the struggle, Rudolf Hess quickly joined a right-wing band of veterans called the Thule Gesellschaft – the Thule Society – set up to counter the organised thuggery of the Spartakusbund. Over the course of the next five months, much bitter street-fighting ensued in the struggle to prevent the Spartakists consolidating their grip on power in Bavaria. The Thule Gesellschaft may be considered a forerunner of the Nazi Party, created before National Socialism became a concept; indeed, created even before Adolf Hitler became prominent. It was a nationalist anti-Bolshevik society, used the swastika as its emblem, and loudly proclaimed the motto ‘Remember you are German. Keep your blood pure.’ It was not as large an organisation as the Spartakists, and its struggle was hard, but events were about to turn in its favour.

      In late April 1919, the Spartakists captured seven Thule Society members and an innocent bystander called Professor Berger, a Jewish academic who had the incredible bad luck to be swept up as a member of the anti-Semitic society. His luck was about to get worse, as all eight men were summarily executed. The Spartakists then made the fatal error of accepting three Bolshevik emissaries sent from Moscow by Lenin. These three Russian agitators promptly took over the Spartakusbund, and began to consolidate their power-base in Bavaria’s new Räterepublik by instigating a Soviet-style purge.

      This was all too much for the new German government. From Weimar in Thuringia they watched events in Bavaria and blanched, for the Spartakusbund had nailed its colours to the mast by declaring that its ultimate aim was to topple the legitimate government and set up a Soviet Germany. Prompted by a sense of self-preservation, the government sent troops in to restore order, gladly accepting help from the Freikorp Epp (a right-wing paramilitary organisation affiliated to the Thule Society), and succeeded in toppling the Spartakists. With the collapse of the Räterepublik most people in southern Germany breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and hoped that the natural order of predominantly conservative Bavaria would re-assert itself,