The Flight of Rudolf Hess

Few mysteries of recent times have the power to seize the imagination like that of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy, who flew to Scotland alone and unarmed in the middle of the Second World War in order to broker peace. Arrested ignominiously by the Home Guard - 'Dad's Army' - Hess was imprisoned, all the while protesting that he had come to meet the Duke of Hamilton, Scotland's Premier Peer and, Hess believed, the leader of an aristocratic peace party. Meanwhile, Hitler denounced him as a madman who had stolen a plane while in the grip of a delusion, and the German nation, to whom he had been something of a hero, abruptly disowned him. After spending the rest of the war confined in Britain, Hess was taken to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau Prison, Berlin. It was there that he died, apparently by his own hand, in August 1987, aged 93, after over twenty years as the sole prisoner in the jail.