Hess Goes over the Hill

The No. 3 Nazi and Adolf Hitler's best friend was the first man in Europe to revolt successfully against Adolf Hitler.

This most extraordinary story of the world's most extraordinary war began last week this way: On Monday night the Nazi Party headquarters in Berlin announced that Rudolf Walther Richard Hess was missing on a plane flight. Against Adolf Hitler's orders --for Hess was suffering from a "progressive disease"--Hess had boarded a plane in Augsburg, Bavaria on Saturday. Since then he was presumed to have disappeared and died. He had left behind a letter which "showed clearly traces of mental disorder which led to fears that Party Comrade Hess was a victim of hallucinations." Hess's adjutants, it was also reported from Germany, had been arrested.That was for letting the 47-year-old leader (after Hitler) of the Nazi Party, and the designated heir (after Hitler and Goring) of the Nazi State, fly a ship in his "unhealthy" condition.

Then suddenly it all became most embarrassing for the Germans.

For 48 hours the man to whom the German people 20 months ago had been pledged by Hitler to "be in duty bound . . . equally as you have been to me," had been a fugitive from the sprawling Nazi domain.

Fortnight before, Hitler's "shadow"--the young World War I infantryman and Air Force pilot who had got caught in the 1923 Munich beer-hall Putsch and had gone to jail with Hitler and had helped him write Mein Kampf in prison--had traveled to Augsburg and decorated Willy Messerschmitt at the Messerschmitt aircraft factory for services to the Fatherland. Three days later Hess had sat on the dais of Berlin's Kroll Opera House, arms folded and beetle-brows lowered, while his frenzied colleague of 21 hard years of struggle had crowed over the victory in the Balkans. Six days after that Hess had returned to Augsburg and, somehow securing a twin-engined Messerschmitt 110, had roared off to Scotland.

The first citizen of Britain to know about Hess's flight was David McLean, a tenant on the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, near Glasgow. David was in the house Saturday night and everyone else was in bed when he heard a plane overhead. He ran out back of the farm, heard a crash and saw a plane burst into flame in his field. A man was coming down in a parachute, so David got out his pitchfork.

The man fell to earth, wrapped in silk, and groaning. David took him prisoner.

The German was very agreeable. David's family gave him tea, which he refused in favor of water, and some soldiers came up and took him off to a Glasgow hospital to mend his broken ankle. He was removed to "an unspecified destination." The British Ministry of Information identified the airman prisoner. Then it bided its time, waited for the Germans to break its story. When the hallucination-disappearance yarn came from Berlin, Minister Alfred Duff Cooper and his men called in the London newspapermen on Monday night and. dancing with excitement, broke this war's, or any other war's, most incredible tale of desertion. It was as if Harry Hopkins or Anthony Eden had suddenly flown to Germany, but the in credible arrival was augustly confirmed from Prime Minister Churchill's office at No. 10 Downing Street. No. 3 Nazi Hess had indeed spectacularly gone over the hill.

Why? Rudolf Hess was never rated by anyone as one of the Beasts of Berlin.

Fellow South Germans, no matter what they thought of other Nazi bigwigs, thought of him as a good fellow. After the war he studied "geopolitics," and introduced Hitler to his old professor, Karl Haushofer, the subsequent Nazi super-geopolitician. As Adolf Hitler went up, Hess the Party leader more & more con trolled German political patronage. Last week his Party and country were winning their great, long-plotted struggle. He and his wife Use and their three-year-old boy were supposed to be the representative "Aryan" family of the triumphant Aryan race. Everything seemed to be going right for Rudolf Hess. Why did he quit? Since his sanity has been attested by the most reliable and most recent diplomatic visitors to Germany, there were few reasons available, except that: 1)Hess, a patriotic but sensitive, educated man, was insufferably disillusioned by the world-squashing Nazi march, or 2) he feared for his safety to the extent that he could not only quit his Fatherland but his family.

As a personal shock to neurotic Adolf Hitler, the desertion of Best Friend Hess was likely to be potent. To the Nazi Party and the German people it could also be a hard blow. To the British, with whom he had sought sanctuary, Hess's potential revelations of Nazi secrets and strategy could be equal to a tremendous victory.

Finally admitting that Hess was in Scotland the Nazis began talking about an "hallucination that he was still able to bring about an understanding between Germany and England. . . ."

Official London sources claimed Hess was "sane and healthy," had not brought any peace message.

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