Who Were The People Calling for Rudolf Hess's Release from Spandau Prison?
Having been found guilty of charges one and two of the indictment at the Nuremberg Trials, Rudolf Hess was sentenced to imprisonment for life. As we all know, Hess was doomed to die in prison, and had succumb to death on his own terms by committing suicide at the age of 93 on the 17th of August 1987. You may think that the idea of freeing Hess wasn't a particularly popular one, and that those who were in favour of it were most certainly Neo-Nazis. Well, this wasn't completely the case. In fact, many supporters of freedom were anti-nazi, and believed in freeing him on grounds of compassion. This post will explore support for Rudolf Hess's release through the years until his death.
In order for Hess to be released from prison, all four allied nations (UK, US, France and USSR) had to agree. The Soviets were the only nation opposed to freeing Hess.
The British government had supported the release of Rudolf Hess as early as 1956. In total, the UK made 11 unilateral attempts (along with 9 more from the French and US governments) to have Hess released from prison, however, the Soviets refused to budge in their belief that Hess should die in prison.
Pleas for his release on humanitarian grounds were made by UK politicians from the Conservative and Labour Parties. An appeal was also drafted in the name of Margaret Thatcher. The following read:
“There is to my mind no justification for keeping Hess in prison any longer. He is 88. He has been in prison for 40 years. He has been without the company of other prisoners for over 16 years. Humanitarian reasons demand that no one should be treated this way.”
Debates were also made in the House of Lords regarding the imprisonment of Rudolf Hess. A quote from Hansard on the 9th of February 1967 from Lord Robertson of Oak-Ridge said:
“Twenty one years have passed and all the others have gone. They have died or have been released on completion of their sentences. He alone remains, feebleminded, useless, dangerous to nobody. He is kept there still. It is pointless; it is inhumane.”
Support for his release even grew in the German government. In 1986, former German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, addressed and sent letters to Ronald Reagan, Francois Mitterand, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev (the respective leaders of the allied nations) , in which he wrote:
“I urgently appeal to you to mercifully release the prisoner into the bosom of his family. I believe that a pardon for Rudolf Hess is a dictate of humanity.”
His lawyer, Dr. Alfred Seidl was making appeals for his release as early as 1947, but these were always vetoed.
Outside of government, support for Hess's release was growing, and that was in the form of the Freedom for Rudolf Hess movement, a campaign that had begun in 1967 (not long after the release of Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach) by Hess's son, Wolf Rüdiger. He started a petition calling for the release of his father. It had started at 700 signatures, but by 1974 had reached 350,000. In the book The Loneliest Man in the World, Eugene Bird claims to Hess that including those that signed this petition were lawyers, judges and even Nobel Prize Winners. He also tells Hess that there had been a movement set up in the US Congress to have him freed.
A little side note to this: Karl Dönitz had in fact attended one of the Freedom for Rudolf Hess meetings. As shown here. These images were taken in 1975. Hess's son, Wolf, is in picture number 2 (Taken from an old blog @/eternalvonschirach).
These calls to have Hess released would however fall on deaf ears. The Soviets insisted on him dying in prison. Their justification was that Hess was still an unrepentant Nazi, a man who still believed in his innocence. They were still unforgiving for the flight to Britain, in which they were firm in their belief that Hess wanted peace with Britain so Germany would not have to face a two front war.
And so Hess would die alone in prison, as the 'loneliest man in the world'.
