On the evening of May 10, 1941, the Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany climbed into a fighter plane, flew alone to Scotland, and was never a free man again. Within hours he was captured. His wife and three-year-old son had no idea he was going. Ilse Hess was in Munich when she learned her husband had flown to Scotland.
She was forty years old. Their son, Wolf Rüdiger, nicknamed Buzz, was three. Within forty-eight hours, Berlin denounced Rudolf Hess as mentally ill, erased his position as Deputy Führer, and left Ilse the wife of a man the regime no longer recognized. Her husband was still alive.
The marriage, in every sense the state understood, was over. Hess had taken off alone that evening from the Augsburg-Haunstetten airfield in a Messerschmitt Bf 110, intending to negotiate peace with Britain. The mission was unauthorized. His parachute landed near Eaglesham in the dark, and by the time British forces reached him, the German government was already scrambling to contain the damage.
Ilse learned the details piece by piece from contradictory official statements and whispers within the party. She packed what she could and moved with the boy to the family’s country house at Bad Oberdorf, a spa village in the Allgäu Alps near Hinterlang. The decision was partly practical—Munich was exposed to Allied bombing—and partly political. With her husband publicly disowned, the Hess name no longer offered protection.
She lived quietly there for the remainder of the war while Rudolf was held in British custody at secure locations, most notably Maeldiff Court in Wales. She saw him only through photographs. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, Hess was transferred to stand trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. On October 1, 1946, the tribunal convicted him on counts of crimes against peace and conspiracy.
Twelve of his co-defendants received death sentences. Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment. On July 18, 1947, he was transferred with six other convicted men to Spandau Prison in the British sector of West Berlin, administered jointly by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Ilse’s own situation had already collapsed.
On June 3, 1947, she was arrested with all the wives of the Nuremberg defendants and sent to the internment camp at Augsburg-Göggingen. Wolf Rüdiger, now nine, was sent to live with an aunt. He attended school under a name that teachers recognized and classmates whispered about. The boy whose godfather had been Adolf Hitler was now the son of a Nuremberg prisoner, growing up in a country that wanted to forget both his father and him.
A denazification tribunal classified Ilse as a follower, under group three. The category applied to those deemed sympathetic to Nazi ideology, but not actively criminal. She was released on March 24, 1948, and returned to the Allgäu. Mother and son were reunited.
The man at the center of their lives was behind four power walls, and he had made it clear that he did not want them to visit. The refusal was deliberate. Rudolf Hess told his family that Spandau’s conditions were not fit for his wife to see, and for twenty-eight years, he held to that position. Each inmate was allowed four sheets of paper for correspondence.
Hess used the paper. The visits he turned down. Ilse made the best of what she had. In 1952, she published *England, Nürnberg, Spandau, ein Schicksal in Briefen*—England, Nuremberg, Spandau, a fate in letters—through Druffel Verlag, a far-right publisher that specialized in the literature of former Nazis and their sympathizers.
The book compiled her correspondence with her husband, presenting Hess as a loving husband wrongly imprisoned for a peace mission. An English edition, *Prisoner of Peace*, translated by Merrick Booth and edited by George Pile, was published in 1954. The books generated modest income and a particular kind of attention. In 1955, Ilse opened a pension in Gelenberg, a small district of Bad Hindelang in the Allgäu.
She ran the guesthouse for years, receiving guests who ranged from ordinary holidaymakers to far-right sympathizers who corresponded with her about her husband’s case. Among her long-term correspondents was Winifred Wagner, the former Bayreuth Festival director who had been a close friend of Hitler and never renounced that loyalty. Wolf Rüdiger grew up against this backdrop. He enrolled at the Technical University of Munich in the mid-1950s and qualified as an architect in 1961.
He built a private practice and started a family of his own with his wife Andrea. In the years before he began campaigning publicly, he tried to keep his professional work separate from his father’s name. The line would not hold. On October 1, 1966, Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were released from Spandau after completing their twenty-year sentences.
Rudolf Hess was left alone. The six-hundred-cell prison continued to operate for its single inmate at an annual cost of 800,000 Deutschmarks. For forty-six years, Hess would sit in Allied custody. His wife and son spent those years trying to get him out.
When they finally succeeded, he was already dead. In 1967, Wolf Rüdiger began a formal public campaign for his father’s release. He gave interviews to the Western press, lobbied politicians, and argued that a seventy-three-year-old man in solitary confinement had served his sentence several times over. Ilse filed an application with the European Commission of Human Rights.
The British, French, and American governments gave signs of sympathy. The Soviet Union blocked every proposal. Spandau’s existence in the Western sector of Berlin gave Moscow a political foothold in the city, and they were not giving it up for one aging prisoner. By 1969, the family had campaigned for two years without once being allowed in the room with the man they were fighting for.
In December 1969, Rudolf Hess was admitted to the British Military Hospital in West Berlin with a perforated ulcer. He was seventy-five years old, in severe pain, and for the first time since May 1941, he agreed to let his family come. Ilse, now sixty-nine, walked into the hospital room with Wolf Rüdiger, who was thirty-two. The father he remembered was a photograph.
The man in the bed was twenty-eight years older than the one who had climbed into the Messerschmitt at Augsburg. After he recovered, Hess permitted regular visits for the first time. The routine was strict. Family members were allowed thirty minutes per month, separated from the prisoner by a chest-high partition.
No physical contact was permitted. A guard stood throughout, and topics were monitored. What should have been a reunion after decades was a conversation across a wooden barrier under four-power supervision. Andrea Hess, Wolf Rüdiger’s wife, became a welcome addition to the visiting roster.
She brought photographs and small films of the couple’s three children, which Hess studied closely. The grandchildren themselves were not permitted to visit together—the cell block allowed too few visitors at once. Wolf Rüdiger later told reporters that his father had wanted to hug the children but would never have been allowed to. Wolf Rüdiger turned the campaign into a second profession.
He gave press conferences in Munich, wrote to heads of state, and used every anniversary as an opportunity to press for his father’s release. In 1974, as Hess’s eightieth birthday approached, US President Richard Nixon expressed private support for release on humanitarian grounds. British Foreign Office files declassified in 2007 showed that London had supported release for years. Every attempt ran into the same wall.
The Soviet Union refused. And because Spandau was administered by all four powers, one veto was enough. On April 26, 1984, Hess celebrated his ninetieth birthday inside Spandau. Wolf Rüdiger visited for an hour and told waiting reporters his father was in good humor and had declared he would aim for one hundred.
Fifty well-wishers gathered outside the red brick walls with flowers. West German and Allied diplomats discussed release again. Moscow said no, again. On August 17, 1987, Hess was found dead in a summer house that had been set up in the prison garden as a reading room.
He was ninety-three years old. An electrical extension cable had been strung over a window latch, and a short note addressed to his family was found in his pocket, thanking them for all they had done. He was pronounced dead at the British Military Hospital at 4:10 p. m.
Spandau’s only prisoner was gone, and his family had one last fight left. Within days of the death, Wolf Rüdiger rejected the official account. He and family lawyer Alfred Seidl, who had defended Hess at Nuremberg, argued that a ninety-three-year-old man, too frail to tie his own shoes, could not have hanged himself with an extension cable. On August 21, 1987, Seidl arranged a second autopsy at the Forensic Medicine Institute at the University of Munich.
Professor Wolfgang Spann, head of the institute, conducted the examination. His report found injuries consistent with strangulation rather than the partial hanging described by the British pathologist, though Spann himself stopped short of saying a third party had been involved. The Four Powers Authority ruled the death a suicide on September 17, 1987. Spandau Prison was demolished within weeks.
The rubble was crushed and scattered in the North Sea specifically to prevent the site from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. Hess was initially buried at an undisclosed location. On March 17, 1988, his body was reinterred at the family plot at the Lutheran Cemetery in Wunsiedel, where his parents had owned a holiday home. The gravestone carried the family motto: *”Ich hab’s gewacht”*—I have dared.
Wolf Rüdiger spent the rest of his life arguing that his father had been murdered by British intelligence. He wrote three books advancing the theory: *Mein Vater Rudolf Hess* in 1986, *Mord an Rudolf Hess* in 1989, and *Rudolf Hess, Ich bereue nichts* in 1994. He headed the Rudolf Hess Gesellschaft, a memorial society that operated at the edge of Germany’s organized far right. He rejected the neo-Nazi label for himself, but its annual gatherings drew exactly the audience his books were written for.
In 2007, six years after his death, declassified British files showed the opposite of everything he had campaigned on. London had been pushing for Hess’s release for years. The Soviets had blocked it. The murder plot he had spent four decades constructing had no documentary foundation at all.
Ilse Hess died in Munich on September 7, 1995, at the age of ninety-five. She was buried beside her husband at Wunsiedel. Wolf Rüdiger died of a stroke in a Munich hospital on October 24, 2001, aged sixty-three, survived by Andrea and their three children, including a son, Wolf Andreas Hess. By then, the Wunsiedel grave had become Germany’s most visited neo-Nazi pilgrimage site, drawing thousands of marchers each August on the anniversary of Hess’s death.
In 2005, the Bundestag amended the incitement law specifically to ban the annual marches. The Wunsiedel parish council refused to renew the grave’s lease when it expired in 2011. After a legal challenge by Hess’s granddaughter, the family eventually agreed. On July 20, 2011, the grave was opened at dawn.
The remains were cremated and the ashes scattered at sea by family members. The gravestone was destroyed. In 2019, DNA testing by researchers at the University of Salzburg confirmed with 99. 99 percent certainty that the Spandau prisoner had been Rudolf Hess.
The body double theory had been the one conspiracy his son never wrote a book about. By 2019, science had closed that door too.
