Brainwash and whitewash
Duff Hart-Davis
DOUBLE STANDARDS by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Prior Little, Brown, £20, pp. 578, ISBN 0316857688
ixty years on, the mystery of what happened to Rudolf Hess is still far from solved. At 5.45 pm on 10 May 1941 Hitler's Deputy took off from Augsburg, near Munich, in a Messerschmitt 110 fighterbomber, apparently to seek peace with England. Late that night he, or someone very like him, crash-landed near Eaglesham, south of Glasgow, and was arrested by the Home Guard. The prisoner, whom the British have ever since passed off as Hess, was kept in custody during the war, then tried at Nuremberg, sentenced to life imprisonment and incarcerated at Spandau, in Berlin, where he died on 17 August 1987. But was this wretched man really Hess, or a doppelganger?
Serious doubts about the man's identity were first raised by Hugh Thomas. the Welsh surgeon who examined him in Spandau. In his book The Murder of Rudolf Hess. published in 1979, Thomas blew traditional accounts apart by revealing that. whereas Hitler's henchman had been shot through the left lung by a rifle bullet during the first world war, the man in the gaol had never been wounded, and so could not be Hess.
The government of the day, backed by traditional historians, lost no time in trying to rubbish this awkward discovery; but in 1987 Thomas was vindicated. By then Hess's chest wound had been authenticated by the discovery of contemporary records; but when the old man of Spandau died, two elaborate post-mortem examinations confirmed that he had never been shot through the lung. In trying to silence the controversy that erupted, senior British politicians made more than 140 misleading statements, many of them expressly mendacious.
Double Standards is the latest attempt to unravel the mass of contradictions which the saga has produced. Briefly, the authors accept that Thomas was, and is, right: that the man we sent to Nuremberg and Spandau was a double, and that in the end he was murdered at our instigation because we feared that the Russians were about to release him unilaterally, and that, once free, he would start to talk.
Widespread research has led them to present the earlier part of the story as follows. Hess flew to Scotland, as history relates. His aim was to land secretly on the private airfield at Dungavel, home of the Duke of Hamilton, one of the leading lights in the British faction wanting to make peace with Germany, but he lost his bearings and had to parachute, whereupon news of his arrival leaked out. The prime minister, Winston Churchill, and some senior colleagues had been expecting him, and they handled the whole affair most skilfully, putting out the minimum of news about their prisoner so as to keep Hitler guessing. After finding out all they could from Hess, they packed him off to Braemore, a shooting lodge belonging to the Duke of Portland, in the wilds of Caithness, and substituted an identical double at Maindiff Court, near Abergavenny, where (the official version has it) the Nazi leader spent most of the war.
There the double was brainwashed by deep hypnosis into believing that he was indeed Hitler's Stellvertreter — and this was why. for the rest of his life, he continued to play the part. As for the actual Hess, he met his fate in the far north of Scotland on 25 August 1942, in the flying boat crash that also killed Prince George. Duke of Kent, younger brother of King George VI. The Duke, who was trying to spirit Hess away to Sweden, was an active member of the British peace party, and it was his involvement in the affair that has kept the British government lying ever since.
Compressed like that, the story sounds absurdly far-fetched. In fact much of it is compelling, with good new detail culled from far and wide. Yet there is far too much breezy inference, too many 'must have been's, 'obviously's, 'would seem to's; and anyone familiar with the saga can see that the authors have been selective in their choice of evidence, simply omitting things that do not suit them. Their account of Hess's flight is particularly misleading, for they ignore the very strong evidence which shows that the Messerschmitt which reached Scotland was a Mark E2 — a different aircraft, with different identification letters on its fuselage, from the one in which the Deputy Parer took off.
Although Double Standards teases out more strands of the puzzle, it does not resolve the central tangle, or explain why some files on the case are still closed. Surely it is time for the Prime Minister to reveal what really happened, or else to admit that Britain harbours agencies which operate without the Government's knowledge or control.
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