by Christopher Fulkerson
CF Conducting Maxwell Davies
Vesalii icones
Rudolf Hess was #3 Nazi when he stole a plane and made a solo flight to England, parachuting over Scotland, on an apparently self-appointed mission to negotiate a peace. What he said about this in any detail is not discussed here - only generalities are offered. This book is about Hess's treatment as a mental case by the British, and serves to give the geography of his stay among their Isles. He was a serious problem because if anything happened to him the English were afraid the Germans would claim they had hurt him on purpose.
Assuming the autobiographical essay included in this book is really his, Hess was a mental case all right, and far too crazy to have been tried at Nuernberg, where his presence in the dock gave a resonance of Allied intransigence, and as I will try to suggest, a particular problem for the judges to have to puzzle through, to prove they were paying attention. (On this point I think the judges acquitted themselves.) There is continually a curious "message" to Hess's behavior, I don't mean to overstate its value as a message, but it is a fact that the Allied interrogators found him furiously frustrating to speak with. Again and again he found ways to suggest that he didn't remember most of his life. There is a method to his elusiveness; he was tested many times and finally, in my opinion for political reasons, found to be fit to stand trial at Nuernberg, though it is evident that he wasn't, in fact, mentally fit. The "admission" he made before the closed court about his amnesia being a sham was written on a sheet of paper for him to read from. Was the writing of the note another of Dr. Gustave Mahler Gilbert's maneuvers? It seems plausible that Hess himself wrote it but if he did it's one of the only cogent things he uttered in verbal or written form during the entire time from 1941-1946. Within months of his "admission" to shamming, serious observers conceded he was, after all, a nut case. Today we would not try him, though there might have to be a legal protocol before locking him up. Perhaps that's what the Nuernberg judges thought they were doing. All eight judges sat across from him for six hours a day and watched his behavior for the entire year of the trial - they didn't think he deserved to die. Instead of a death sentence, Hess got life in prison, the same thing as life in the funny farm. Let us believe that the judges realized the problem of sentencing to death a crazy man from a regime that had sentenced its crazy people to death, and which for that reason among others was found to be evil. So if there is a message to Hess's madness, maybe it's the proposition "If you hang absolutely everybody in the dock, then your attitude to the mentally infirm is the same as ours." So, whether they meant it or not, the Allies had, encrypted into the Nuernberg case, a problem that meant they could not give everybody the death sentence. And there was Frick right down the aisle from Hess, Frick, who had murdered the mentally ill as "useless eaters."
The Russians would never allow Hess's release, so he became the longest-lived Nazi to have been tried at Nuernberg, the only prisoner in a huge 600-person prison; he eventually committed suicide. (Did you know that when the Bastille was stormed, there was only one prisoner inside?) There is in Hess's story a bizarre cryptic continuity, an insane self-similarity, almost insight, that is worth knowing about... if anything in Nazi Germany is worth knowing about.
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First posted 3/28/2011
Copyright c 2011 by Christopher Fulkerson.