Hess mess
Sir: How could you devote a whole page of your valuable space to John Zametica's review of Hess: A Tale of Two Murders (23 July)? On 10 May 1941, a Messerschmitt 110 (the remains of which are — or at least were until recently — to be seen at the Imperial War Museum's Duxford airfield) arrived over Scotland. The pilot, who was alone in an aircraft normally carrying a crew of two or three, baled out and was instantly recognised as Rudolf Hess by Graham Donald, the Royal Observer Corps officer and former first world war pilot who went to look for him after the crash was reported. Throughout the years until his death, virtually everyone — in wartime London, at the Nuremberg trials, in Spandau prison — was certain that the man was Hess. Even his own family apparently have no doubts on that score.
One is therefore bound to ask: first, if the man was a double serving Heinrich Himmler's purposes, why did he accept being tried for war crimes as Rudolf Hess
LETTERS
and then serve a life sentence without ever attempting to prove his own identity? Secondly, how did Himmler find — at quite short notice — a double who was also a skilled pilot and navigator capable of such a difficult night-time flight, and did the Luftwaffe really have another ME 110 to spare?
Mr Zametica is probably closest to the truth when he writes that `. . . the entire subject of surgery and wound-healing has to be rewritten'. If Dr Hugh Thomas found no sign of bullet wounds on Hess's body, it surely means that they had healed and/or been disguised by later surgery. Another possibility is that Hess — like other Nazi leaders — was not above falsifying his own military record.
Neville Beale
Chelsea Manor Street, London SW3
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