DNA analysis showed that Rudolf Hess did not have a double.
German Rudolf Hess, deputy Fuehrer of Adolf Hitler, in May 1941 went secretly to Great Britain to conclude a peace agreement with the government. However, Hess's plan failed, he was taken prisoner and stayed in Great Britain until 1945, and after the Nürberg trial he ended up in Berlin's Spandau prison, where he committed suicide in 1987.
Doubts that Hess was in Spandau arose from the very beginning. One of the main supporters of the version that instead of Hess, his double went to prison was US President Franklin Roosevelt. The British government tried to investigate the case, but did not come to an unequivocal conclusion. After Hess's remains were cremated in 2011, it was believed that the last chance to conduct a DNA analysis was missed.
However, the retired American military doctor Sherman McCall and Austrian forensic experts managed to put an end to many years of disputes - Rudolf Hess was indeed in Spandau.
They talked about the work done in the Forensic Science International Genetics journal.
As it turned out, not all of the prisoner's DNA was destroyed. In Spandau, the leadership changed every month - representatives of the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and France alternately ran the prison. In 1982, during an examination, American military doctor Philip Pittman took a blood sample from Hess. Pathologist Rick Wall applied the blood to a slide, which was labeled Spandau # 7 (the number was assigned at Hess Prison), hermetically sealed, and later sent as training material to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
In the mid-1990s, another US military doctor, Sherman McCall, while in an army hospital, learned about this sample.
“I first heard about the existence of Hess’s blood sample when I was at Walter Reed Hospital,” he says. "I only learned about historical contradictions a few years later."
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McCall immediately understood the potential of the sample for possible research. He contacted molecular biologist Jan Kemper-Kisslich of the Department of Legal Medicine at the University of Salzburg and told him about the sample. It was indeed possible to extract the DNA of its owner from the dried blood.
Now it was necessary to find a living relative of Hess. Through a British historian, scientists managed to get the phone number of Hess's son, Wolf Rudiger, but they were late - he died in 2001.
The search for other relatives took a lot of time - there was little information about the family, and the surname turned out to be very common in Germany. However, in the end, scientists managed to find a living male relative of Hess. He agreed to the experiment, but refused to participate in further discussion of the results.
The researchers focused on the Y chromosome, which is inherited only through the male line, and a number of genetic markers elsewhere in the genome. The analysis showed that the owner of the new sample is a relative of the person who was in prison with a probability of 99.99%.
Referring to privacy, scientists do not talk about how Hess's relatives took this news. However, they note, Hess's wife never believed in the version of Hess's substitution.
Visiting him in prison, she once ironically asked the British chief Spandau: "How is the double doing there today?"
"The conspiracy theory that prisoner Spandau # 7 was an impostor is extremely unlikely and therefore refuted," the authors of the work conclude.
Rudolf Hess, 31, became Adolf Hitler's private secretary in 1925. He admired the ideas of the future Fuhrer from the day they met in 1920. “If anyone will free us from Versailles, it will be this person,” Hess said. Later he became a member of the Reichstag, and then - Hitler's deputy for all party affairs. In the meeting room of the Cabinet of Ministers, Hess, who was entrusted with personnel decisions in the field of civil service, occupied a privileged seat to the left of Hitler.
Then Hess became Reichsminister without portfolio - without directing any ministry, he had the plenipotentiary right to vote at government meetings. By decree of the Reich Chancellor of September 22, 1933, Hess was removed from the SS while maintaining the rank of Obergruppenführer, which meant that the Deputy Fuhrer would no longer be subordinate to anyone except Hitler himself.
On the eve of World War II, Hess tried to achieve an alliance with Great Britain. The war between the fraternal Germanic peoples is destroying both in England and in Germany "the best material" and "world Bolshevism" could emerge victorious from this, he believed. In his view, there were powerful political forces in Great Britain that could force Churchill to peace.
However, in Germany, his 1941 peacekeeping mission was seen as a betrayal.
"This man is dead to me, and he will be hanged where we catch him," Hitler said.
Hess was declared insane and his behavior was attributed to delusional disorder.
The streets and squares of German cities, bearing the name of Hess, were renamed. Hospitals have lost his name. The anthroposophical schools of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, which were patronized by Hess, were closed. In the editions of National Socialist literature, the name of Rudolf Hess was blackened, in the new editions of Mein Kampf, Hess, who took an active part in writing the book and invented its title, was not mentioned.
To finally destroy the image of Hess in the party, the politician Martin Bormann accused him of inferiority and impotence complexes, hinted at the adultery of Ilse Hess and suspected that Rudolf Hess was not the biological father of Wolf Rüdiger. According to Hitler's decree, the headquarters of the Deputy Fuehrer was renamed into the Party Chancellery, personally subordinate to the Fuehrer. It was headed by Bormann.
In Great Britain, Hess was captured. However, they treated him well - he was under guard in a Victorian villa, received fish, chicken and eggs scarce for the country, and was provided with books and writing materials. At the same time, the circle of his visitors was determined by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he also did not receive newspapers and could not listen to the radio.
Hess, on the other hand, was panicky afraid that he might be poisoned or tried to lead to suicide. After 10 days of imprisonment, a psychiatrist was even invited to him, who confirmed that he was in an unstable mental state.
He stayed in Great Britain until 1945, when he was brought to Germany for the Nuremberg Trials as one of the 24 main war criminals of the Third Reich, accused of unleashing an aggressive war of conquest, mass extermination of civilians, numerous atrocities, crimes against humanity and violation of international laws of conduct. war.
By this time, Hess developed amnesia, he did not remember what happened to him and how he got to the UK.
Hess brought with him small unopened bags containing samples of food that was fed to him in Great Britain and, in his opinion, was deliberately poisoned with the secretions of the glands of camels and pigs. He also had a rambling statement that the people who were guarding him in the UK, judging by their glassy gazes, were under the influence of some secret chemical.
Hess sat in the cell all day, staring at one point. He did not recognize his former party members and secretaries at the confrontation. Psychiatrists confirmed that he was not faking amnesia, but found him legally sane. However, on November 30, Hess himself stated that he was simulating amnesia, and that his memory was in perfect order. Psychiatrists attributed the appearance and disappearance of "amnesia due to hysteria", as well as the delirium of persecution in Rudolf Hess in Great Britain, by external factors: the failure of his mission, being in captivity, defeat in the war.
In 1946, Hess was convicted of crimes against peace and war crimes as well as crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. Until 1970, he was in a solitary confinement cell measuring 3x2 meters, then after a serious illness he was transferred to a double cell that had previously served as a chapel. Now he was allowed to make his own tea, use a knife and fork, regulate the temperature on the radiator and open windows. He could also watch TV - he chose the programs he was interested in, and the censors then issued permission to watch. Since 1977, the total walking time per day has already been 4 hours.
In recent years, an orderly took care of the elderly Hess - he helped him wash, weighed, measured his blood pressure, and provided the necessary medicines. By this time, he had already been relieved of his work, only making his bed and watering the flowers.
In prison, Hess became friends with Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Byrd, who, in exchange for small favors, asked Hess about the past and even published a book with the memoirs of the Deputy Fuhrer, for which he was dismissed from the army. It followed from the book that Hess never admitted his guilt and did not repent.
He wanted to remain "the most loyal of Hitler's loyalists," and that was the purpose of his life in prison.
His views in prison did not change, his will was not broken.
On August 17, 1987, Hess committed suicide in his cell. He was 93 years old. He was buried in the family plot in the Lutheran cemetery. In 2011, the lease on the site expired, and Hess's relatives removed his remains, cremated and scattered over the sea.