Rudolf Hess Dies: Hitler's Last Inner Circle Member

Rudolf Hess hanged himself with an electrical cord in a garden summerhouse at Spandau Prison in West Berlin on August 17, 1987. He was 93 years old, blind in one eye, and had been the sole inmate of a 600-cell prison for 21 years, guarded in monthly rotation by soldiers from the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. His death ended one of the strangest imprisonments of the 20th century and eliminated the last surviving member of Adolf Hitler's inner circle. Hess had been Hitler's deputy since the earliest days of the Nazi Party, serving as the man who transcribed Mein Kampf during Hitler's imprisonment in Landsberg in 1924. He rose to become Deputy Fuhrer, the party's second-ranking official, and administered the vast Nazi bureaucracy. Then, on May 10, 1941, he did something that bewildered the world: he flew a Messerschmitt Bf 110 solo from Germany to Scotland, apparently hoping to negotiate a peace deal with Britain before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. He parachuted into a field near the Duke of Hamilton's estate, was captured by a farmer, and spent the rest of the war in British custody. At the Nuremberg Trials, Hess was convicted of crimes against peace and conspiracy to commit crimes but acquitted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and transferred to Spandau. The other six convicted Nazis held there were released over the following decades as their sentences expired. After Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were released in 1966, Hess remained alone. The Soviet Union repeatedly vetoed Western proposals to release him, viewing his continued imprisonment as a symbol of the wartime alliance's judgment against Nazism. The cost of maintaining Spandau for a single prisoner ran into millions annually. Hess's death was ruled a suicide, though his son Wolf Rudiger Hess spent years alleging that British agents had murdered his father to prevent him from revealing details about his 1941 peace mission. Spandau Prison was demolished within weeks of Hess's death, razed to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.