The final chapter of the Second World War’s most enigmatic prisoner closed not with a trial, but with a body discovered in a garden shed. On August 17, 1987, Rudolf Hess, the former Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany, was found dead inside a small summer house within the grounds of Spandau Prison in West Berlin. He was 93 years old.
An electrical cord was wrapped around his neck, and the official verdict, delivered by the four Allied powers that had guarded him for four decades, was suicide. For his family, however, that verdict was the beginning of a new battle, not the end of an old ordeal.
The death of Hess marked the conclusion of one of the most bizarre and contentious episodes in post-war history. He had been the sole inmate of Spandau, a fortress built for 600 prisoners, for over twenty years. His guards, a rotating contingent of soldiers from the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, were tasked with watching over a frail, near-blind old man who spent his days shuffling through the prison garden.
Yet, for his wife, Ilse, and his only son, Wolf Rüdiger, the story of their family’s suffering had begun decades earlier, on a night in May 1941 when their world was irrevocably shattered by a single, reckless flight.
The Hess family’s ordeal did not begin with the fall of Berlin in 1945. It began on the evening of May 10, 1941, when Rudolf Hess, then 47 years old and Hitler’s most loyal disciple, climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf-110 at an airfield near Augsburg. Believing he could broker a peace deal with Britain and secure Germany’s western flank before the invasion of the Soviet Union, he flew alone towards Scotland.
His target was Dungavel House, the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, whom Hess mistakenly believed led a faction of British aristocrats willing to negotiate. Shortly before midnight, low on fuel and lost in the darkness, he bailed out, parachuting into a Scottish field near the village of Eaglesham. A local farmer found him tangled in his parachute; Hess identified himself as “Hauptmann Alfred Horn” and asked to be taken to the Duke.
Within hours, his true identity was confirmed. The man who had helped Hitler write Mein Kampf and had been named Deputy Führer in 1933 was now a prisoner of the British Crown. He would never be a free man again.
In Germany, the news hit like a thunderclap. Hitler was reportedly furious, not only at the diplomatic embarrassment but at the unauthorized nature of the flight. Within days, the Nazi leadership declared Hess mentally ill.
Martin Bormann, Hess’s ambitious deputy, moved swiftly to fill the vacuum, being appointed head of the Party Chancellery just four days after the flight. Hess was stripped of all his positions and expelled from the Nazi Party. To the German public, he was portrayed as a deluded man, manipulated by astrologers and mystics.
For Ilse Hess and their three-year-old son, Wolf Rüdiger, the consequences were immediate and severe. Ilse had been at home in Munich when her husband departed that afternoon, kissing her goodbye and telling her he would return late. She knew nothing of his plan.
The first she learned of his fate came days later through official channels.
She was summoned for interrogation by the Gestapo, questioned about her husband’s intentions. Her household was searched, and personal items were confiscated, including Rudolf’s car, a gift from Hitler himself. Yet, Ilse was not abandoned.
Despite the regime’s public condemnation, Hitler intervened privately to protect the family. He ordered that Ilse receive a monthly pension of 100 Reichsmarks, enough to maintain a modest existence. She was not interned or placed under formal arrest.
Hitler’s personal loyalty to the man who had served him so faithfully extended to his family, even after the flight that had so embarrassed the Reich. Ilse left Munich and took her son to live in the small alpine village of Hinderang in the Allgäu region of Bavaria. There, young Wolf Rüdiger, whom his parents called “Buz,” grew up largely unaware of the political storm surrounding his father.
He knew only that his father was gone, that he was somewhere far away, and that one day he would return.
Rudolf Hess spent the war years in British captivity. He was held at various locations, including briefly the Tower of London, becoming one of the last prisoners ever held there. For most of his imprisonment, he was kept at a secure facility near Aldershot, where he was interrogated repeatedly and examined by psychiatrists.
British authorities noted his increasingly erratic behavior, his claims that his food was poisoned, his bouts of apparent amnesia, and his attempts at suicide. Whether his mental instability was genuine or a calculated act remains debated by historians to this day. When the war ended in May 1945, Hess was transferred to Germany to stand trial at Nuremberg.
He was one of 24 major war criminals indicted before the International Military Tribunal. Unlike Hermann Göring, who had commanded the Luftwaffe, or Heinrich Himmler, who had built the SS, Hess had been absent from Germany since 1941. He had not participated in the Holocaust.
His crimes, the tribunal would determine, were those of conspiracy and planning aggressive war.
Throughout the trial, Hess exhibited strange behavior. He sat in the dock reading novels while evidence of Nazi atrocities was presented. He stared vacantly into space and claimed to have no memory of events, people, or even his own identity.
His lawyer struggled to mount a coherent defense for a client who seemed determined to undermine his own case. Then, on November 30, 1946, Hess rose to address the tribunal. In a statement that shocked the courtroom, he declared that his amnesia had been simulated.
“My memory is again in order,” he announced. “The reasons why I simulated loss of memory were tactical.” It was a dramatic moment, but it did nothing to help his case.
The tribunal convicted him on two counts: crimes against peace and conspiracy to commit crimes. He was acquitted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, largely because his departure from Germany predated the worst atrocities. On October 1, 1946, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
His final words to the tribunal were defiant: “I have no regrets.”
On July 18, 1947, Hess was transferred to Spandau Prison in the British sector of West Berlin along with six other convicted war criminals. The prison, a forbidding 19th-century fortress, would now house just seven. The four powers shared responsibility for guarding the prisoners, rotating control on a monthly basis.
It was an arrangement born of wartime alliance and Cold War suspicion, and it would persist for four decades. For Ilse Hess, the end of the war brought a different kind of imprisonment. On June 3, 1947, she was arrested by Allied forces along with the wives of other convicted war criminals.
She was transferred to an internment camp at Augsburg-Göggingen, where she was held for questioning and denazification proceedings. Young Wolf Rüdiger, now nine years old, was left in the care of an aunt. He would not see his mother again for nearly a year.
The internment camp was a jarring change for Ilse. She had grown up in a wealthy nationalist family in Hanover. She had been among the first women to study at the University of Munich, where she met Rudolf Hess in April 1920.
She had joined the Nazi Party in 1921, one of its earliest female members. She had believed in the cause, had supported her husband’s rise, and had watched him become one of the most powerful men in Germany. It was Ilse who had first introduced Rudolf to Adolf Hitler, and it was Ilse who had encouraged Rudolf to approach Himmler about a position in the SS.
Now she found herself in a barracks room with 16 other women, the wives and widows of men the world now condemned as monsters. In letters written from the camp, she described the difficulty of never being alone and the loss of privacy. Yet she also wrote of the comradeship among the women, of finding unexpected solidarity in their shared circumstances.
On March 24, 1948, Ilse was released from internment. She had not been charged with any crime. She returned to the Allgäu region and began to rebuild her life.
The years that followed were marked by a singular focus: securing her husband’s release. Ilse became an author, publishing books that portrayed Rudolf as a man of peace, a martyr who had risked everything to end the war. In 1952, she published a collection of letters exchanged with her husband during his imprisonment.
An English translation, Prisoner of Peace, appeared in 1954. The book presented Hess’s flight to Scotland as a noble peace mission and his subsequent imprisonment as a grave injustice. In 1955, Ilse opened a small pension, a guest house in the Allgäu, to support herself financially.
She maintained correspondence with other unrepentant Nazis and their families. She also became involved with Stille Hilfe, or Silent Help, a welfare organization founded in 1951, ostensibly to assist Germans convicted by Allied tribunals. In practice, Stille Hilfe became a support network for former Nazis and SS members, providing legal assistance, financial aid, and moral encouragement to those who remained unrepentant.
For Wolf Rüdiger Hess, childhood had been shaped by absence. He had been three years old when his father flew to Scotland, too young to remember him clearly. His knowledge of Rudolf Hess came from his mother’s stories, from photographs, and from letters smuggled out of Spandau.
He grew up in the shadow of a father he had never really known, in a country that regarded that father as a criminal. Wolf Rüdiger attended local schools in Bavaria, keeping a low profile. In the mid-1950s, he enrolled to study architecture, eventually qualifying as an architect in 1961.
But Wolf Rüdiger never accepted his father’s fate. As he grew into adulthood, he became increasingly determined to secure Rudolf’s release. By the 1960s, the other prisoners had begun to leave.
On October 1, 1966, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach completed their 20-year sentences. At midnight, they walked out of Spandau Prison. Rudolf Hess remained behind.
At 72 years old, he was now the sole prisoner in a facility designed for hundreds.
The cost of maintaining Spandau for one elderly prisoner was staggering. West Germany and West Berlin bore the financial burden, spending an estimated 800,000 Deutschmarks annually. The absurdity of the situation was not lost on anyone.
Here was a prison where 37 soldiers and dozens of civilian staff guarded a single old man who spent his days reading, gardening, and walking the same path around the prison yard, 215 paces in one direction, 215 paces back. Wolf Rüdiger launched a formal campaign for his father’s release in 1967. He founded the Rudolf Hess Society, an organization dedicated to securing his father’s freedom.
He gathered signatures on petitions, eventually collecting over 350,000 names by 1974. He cultivated political allies, including Willy Brandt and Lord Geoffrey Lawrence, who had presided over the Nuremberg trials. The Western powers repeatedly proposed releasing Hess on humanitarian grounds, but Spandau was governed by unanimous consent, and the Soviet Union refused.
Moscow saw Hess’s peace mission as an attempt to free Germany to attack Russia without a two-front war.
Rudolf Hess himself refused family visits for decades. From 1941 until 1969, he did not see his wife or son. It was not until December 1969, when Hess was hospitalized for a perforated ulcer, that he finally relented.
Wolf Rüdiger was 32 years old. Ilse was 69. They had not seen Rudolf in 28 years.
After this illness, Hess allowed regular visits. Family members came monthly, though conditions were restrictive. Visits lasted 30 minutes, and a chest-high partition separated prisoner from visitor.
No physical contact was permitted. Wolf Rüdiger’s wife, Andrea, became a particularly welcome guest, bringing photographs and films of the grandchildren Rudolf would never hold. The years ground on.
Hess’s health declined, and he attempted suicide at least four times. In September 1979, medical tests revealed potentially fatal prostate cancer. Hess refused treatment unless he was released.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher personally appealed for Hess’s release in 1982, but the Soviets were immovable.
On August 17, 1987, Rudolf Hess was found unconscious in the summer house. An electrical extension cord was wrapped around his neck. He was pronounced dead at 4:10 p.
m. local time. A note was found in his pocket thanking his family for all they had done.
The four powers announced that his death was a suicide. Wolf Rüdiger Hess refused to accept this verdict. He pointed to his father’s extreme frailty, his severe arthritis, and his near blindness.
How, Wolf asked, could a 93-year-old man in such condition have managed to hang himself? He hired pathologists to conduct a second autopsy and commissioned investigations. He wrote books, including Who Murdered My Father?
His theory was that British intelligence agents had killed his father to prevent his release from revealing embarrassing secrets. The murder theory gained traction in certain circles. Abdallah Melaouhi, Hess’s medical orderly, supported Wolf Rüdiger’s claims, describing finding the summer house in disarray and noting the presence of unknown men in American military uniforms.
Official investigations found no evidence supporting the murder theory, and DNA testing in 2019 definitively proved that the prisoner was indeed Rudolf Hess.
Within weeks of Hess’s death, Spandau Prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. The rubble was reportedly ground up and dumped in the North Sea. Hess was initially buried at a secret location.
On March 17, 1988, his body was reinterred in a family plot in Wunsiedel, Bavaria. The grave quickly became a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis, who gathered every August to march in his honor. The demonstrations grew larger through the 1990s and early 2000s, reaching a peak of over 4,500 participants in 2004.
In 2005, German authorities banned the marches, but neo-Nazis continued to visit the grave individually. In 2011, church authorities refused to renew the lease on the burial plot. Before dawn on July 20, 2011, workers opened the grave and removed what remained of Rudolf Hess.
The bones were cremated, and the ashes were scattered at sea. The gravestone was destroyed.
Ilse Hess did not live to see her husband’s grave destroyed. She died on September 7, 1995, at the age of 95. Until her death, she remained a convinced National Socialist.
She never renounced Hitler or the ideology she had embraced as a young woman. She maintained her correspondence with other unrepentant Nazis and continued to support Stille Hilfe. Her funeral was attended by a small gathering that included Gudrun Burwitz, the daughter of Heinrich Himmler.
Ilse was buried beside her husband in the Wunsiedel cemetery, where their remains would rest together until 2011. Wolf Rüdiger Hess continued his father’s campaign even after Rudolf’s death. He served as head of the Rudolf Hess Society and remained active in far-right circles.
He had a son named Wolf Andreas Hess, a name that carried symbolism, as “Wolf” had been Adolf Hitler’s code name. On October 24, 2001, Wolf Rüdiger Hess suffered a stroke and died at the age of 63. He left behind his widow, Andrea, their children, and a legacy of relentless advocacy.
The Hess family story is unique among the families of Nazi leaders. Unlike the Görings or the Himmlers, the Hess family had nearly half a century to construct their narrative while Rudolf was still alive. The long imprisonment allowed Ilse and Wolf Rüdiger to portray him not as a defeated criminal, but as a persecuted idealist.
This narrative found a receptive audience among neo-Nazis and far-right sympathizers. Hess became a symbol of martyrdom. Yet the family also represents the phenomenon of intergenerational loyalty that characterized many Nazi families.
Neither Ilse nor Wolf Rüdiger ever publicly condemned Rudolf or expressed remorse for the regime he had helped build. They defended, explained, and advocated. They maintained that Rudolf had been ignorant of the Holocaust, that his departure from Germany in 1941 absolved him of the atrocities that followed.
These arguments had some legal basis, but they ignored the broader context of his role in building the regime that made those crimes possible. Rudolf Hess had been there from the beginning. He had marched with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.
He had served prison time with Hitler at Landsberg, where he helped transcribe Mein Kampf. His signature appeared on the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship. He had been one of the most powerful men in the Reich for eight years before his flight to Scotland.
The Hess family’s decades-long campaign reflects a particular kind of denial. It is not the denial that says the Holocaust did not happen, but the denial that says my father, my husband was not truly responsible. It is the compartmentalization that allows family members to separate the man they loved from the crimes of the regime he served.
Today, the name Hess carries a weight that cannot be escaped. The prison where Rudolf spent four decades is gone. His grave has been destroyed, his ashes scattered.
The neo-Nazi marches have been banned. But the questions his story raises about guilt and loyalty, about justice and memory, about how families reckon with monstrous legacies, remain as relevant as ever. Rudolf Hess believed he had dared greatly when he flew to Scotland in 1941.
His gravestone, before it was destroyed, proclaimed as much. But what he dared was not peace. It was a gamble to end a war that his regime had started on terms that would have allowed Nazi Germany to dominate Europe.
His family spent decades portraying him as a martyr. History remembers him as something else: a man who helped build a regime of unprecedented evil and who spent nearly half a century paying for it alone in a prison garden, waiting for a freedom that never came.
